ELLE's June cover girl on relationships, privacy, and her critics

Kristen Stewart has reality fright. On-screen, her unleashed energy captivates and her face offers no unfortunate angles. But off-screen, her discomfort is palpable. In her endearingly unpolished public appearances, she fidgets, scratches, runs her fingers through her hair, and generally bungles her words. (Who can forget her audible throat clearing at the Academy Awards?) Her awkwardness seems to arise from a profound distrust of the media, the limelight, and especially of her considerable recent success as the female lead of the billion-dollar-grossing Twilight movie series. Still, uneasiness this extreme is surprising in an actor, someone who has signed up for a lifetime of being watched.

More From ELLE

Then again, extreme also describes the maelstrom into which Stewart and her costars, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, have been thrust. Not since the heyday of the Brat Pack in the 1980s has a constellation of teens incited such hysteria. "It's a crazy anomaly, this teen-idol phenomenon. I can't think of any like it since the Beatles," says David Slade, director of Eclipse, the third installment in The Twilight Saga, which arrives in theaters at the end of this month. "We'd be [shooting] in a remote location, in the middle of a forest," he continues, "and fans would be at the side of the road with flowers at five in the morning." Twilight mania is such that even those who haven't seen the films, in which Stewart plays Bella Swan, the all-too-human love interest to Edward Cullen's blood-starved teenage vampire (Pattinson), know that "KStew" may or may not be dating "RPattz," her consumptive-looking, bushy-browed costar.

Stewart arrives in the ornate lobby of California's Four Seasons Hotel Westlake Village, a venue chosen for its proximity to a middle-class section of the San Fernando Valley where Stewart was raised, the only girl among a bevy of brothers. There's Cameron, her biological brother, who is 24; Taylor, who is Stewart's age and was adopted at age 13; and Miles and Obie, friends of Cameron's "that we've like helped along the way," she says. "I've always said I've had a bunch of brothers because we have a bunch of boys who are like family." Cameron is a film grip; her parents, John and Jules, also work in the industry (Mom is a script supervisor, Dad a stage manager).

"It's insane! Once somebody finds out, you have to get the hell out of wherever you are," she says emphatically, attempting to convey the madness that has become her life. "People freak out. And the photographers, they're vicious. They're mean. They're like thugs. I don't even want to drive around by myself anymore. It's fucking dangerous." It's a sweltering late-summer afternoon, and Stewart is dressed entirely in black, from her Joy Division T-shirt to the polish on her short nails—the usual teenage suit of armor. Her hair is also black, dyed and chopped into a retro-modern mullet to play Joan Jett in The Runaways, a film she has just finished shooting. As she talks, her words tumble out in knots; she edits herself, starts over, restates her (often wryly funny) point, so that many times it's made through the accumulation of half-uttered phrases. She fiddles with the multiple silver rings (including one made from a spoon handle) on her skinny fingers. Throughout the interview, she bounces one knee.

Stewart, who turned 20 in April, has worked consistently for the past decade, often in independent films, but she admits the Twilight frenzy has taken her by surprise. "Somebody knocked on my hotel room door and asked for a light, then said that they were a big fan. I was like, `Do you really need me to light your cigarette? How do you know what room I'm in?' " She mourns the loss of her privacy. ("I can't be by myself, and I like being by myself," she says.) "Who wouldn't who has a soul?" says Jodie Foster, who starred with an 11-year-old Stewart in Panic Room. "It's a very different time from when I was growing up. We didn't have those lenses that were 150 feet long, or maybe we had them, but there was still a real delineation between the public and the private."

What's mystifying to Stewart—and likely to anyone with either a shred of empathy or a tendency to clam up in public—is the looking- glass reality in which her manner, rather than eliciting sympathy or mere shrugs, has made her a figure of derision. "I think it's funny that when I go onstage to accept an award, they think I'm nervous, uncomfortable, and awkward—and I am—but those are bad words for them," Stewart says. She still frets about her MTV Movie Awards appearance last year, during which she fumbled her award, a carton of golden popcorn (then blurted, "I was just about as awkward as you thought I was going to be. Bye!"). "I fucking flung my award on the stage...and I was like, Everything I just said? Gone. Gone. I might as well have just erased it. And they were like, `I love how she goes up there and tries to be so serious. She is so pretentious. Why does she always try to sound so smart when she's not smart?' "

The "they" and "them" to which Stewart refers, and to which she returns frequently in conversation, as though to linguistic worry stones, are tabloid journalists, bloggers, and online commentators. Later, I ask her to define this "they." She gives me an isn't-it-obvious look. "The people that write shit on the Internet...the professionals that talk bullshit on TV. Bullshit people." It's as if she's internalized the critical voices of our tabloid culture, those whose primary aim is to tear down the idols they themselves have created. But she's so young and full of promise, that as you watch her ape her detractors, you find yourself hoping she'll survive the celebrity spin cycle.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Most of the criticism directed at Stewart centers around her apparent lack of enthusiasm for the extracurricular aspects of the job: the posing, red-carpet walking, and enduring of press junkets required of Hollywood actors today. "People say that I'm miserable all the time. It's not that I'm miserable," Stewart says, explaining her stone-faced red-carpet demeanor, "it's just that somebody's yelling at me.... I literally, sometimes, have to keep myself from crying.... It's a physical reaction to the energy that's thrown at you." Some of the negativity is no doubt jealousy, with fans wishing they were opposite the boys and the girl would get out of the picture. But it's also that devotees of a behemoth such as Twilight treat the actors like extensions of the franchise—human merchandise, if you will—or confuse them with their characters. Stewart's apparent reluctance to participate denies these fans their fantasy. "What she has to say about the part is right there in the movie," says Chris Weitz, director of New Moon, the second film in the Twilight series. "The marketing and publicity are bells and whistles, but to mistake that for a conversation is problematic. Some people incorporate that into their persona... and some people's discomfort with the star system is obvious on the surface."

More From ELLE

Stewart conveys her star-system discomfort (or maybe tries to deal with it) in ways that tend to be perceived not as self-protective, or even self-expressive, but as rebellious. Especially since her choices often thwart mainstream expectations of young women in Hollywood—particularly one who portrays a character beloved by millions of preteens and their mothers. She attends events in sneakers. She was photographed allegedly puffing from a pipe on her front stoop in broad daylight, and in a bikini with a marijuana leaf decorating each breast. She swears like a trucker, just because. "I have a bit of an authority issue," Stewart replied when David Letterman asked her, in that now-famous 2008 interview, whether she had "any interest in going beyond high school. Maybe college or something?" Let it be said that she has a loyal cohort who love her for all this, but they're less vocal than her critics. "[I]f a woman isn't happy and un-opinionated and long-haired and pretty, then she's weird and, like, ugly," she sighs, "And I just don't get it."

"Let's go smoke," she finally announces. We walk outside to a balcony overlooking a faux waterfall. She removes two cigarettes from a pack of Camel Lights, noting that she doesn't care if people "go onto the Internet and say I'm ugly." She minds only when they criticize "the effort I put in." She lights a cigarette, leans forward, and talks with the forbidding intensity evident in her work. "I hate it when they say I'm ungrateful, and I fucking hate it when they say I don't give a shit, because nobody cares more than I do. I'm telling you I don't know anybody who does this that gives a shit more than I do."

"There's a threat to her health in the way she works, in that she can't project feelings she doesn't feel herself," Weitz says. "If you shoot a scene in which she has a nervous breakdown, that's potentially what you're going to get. I have found myself concerned for her at moments." During the filming of Twilight, studio executives found themselves concerned about Stewart and Pattinson. "Both of them have the tendency to go deep, to find the emotional core of a scene," says the first movie's director, Catherine Hardwicke. "I think the producers were worried—and they were right in some ways— that it was going to be one-note, all brooding, all serious." At the mention of this, Stewart swings: "Well, they're thanking their lucky stars now that we were serious about it," she says. "They wanted us to smile more. They literally just thought it was not light enough, not fun enough, that it wasn't like a love story. But I'm sorry, when you're in love with someone, you're not laughing. Well, maybe you are. But not in this story."

A recurring theme among the directors of Stewart's films—a steady stream since an agent spotted her singing "The Dreidel Song" in a school pageant at age eight—is her honesty as a performer, her finely calibrated compass for authenticity. "She has a great bullshit detector," says Greg Mottola, director of Adventureland. "Kristen has an unflinching sense of truth. She doesn't lie," says Mary Stuart Masterson, who directed Stewart in The Cake Eaters. "She has to truly believe what she is doing...which is a great gift but can also feel like a curse, because then the material has to be something you believe in too." Hardwicke adds: "Kristen especially likes to feel good about her lines, as though it would really come out of her mouth. Respecting that would have me doing quite a bit of rewriting on set."

Stewart tends to play adolescent women who are independent-minded yet still uncomfortable in their own skin, much like she is. Telegraphing their neuroses is, in fact, her strength as an actor: Her characters can be truly discomfiting to watch. Yet she also projects a riveting precociousness. Anyone who has seen Into the Wild will find it hard to forget a young, gangly Stewart as 16-year-old Tracy Tatro, perched on a bed in white cotton underwear, vulnerable as a colt yet trembling with need, offering herself to Emile Hirsch's clueless, idealistic Christopher McCandless. "Kristen can express all that longing and desire and anxiety with a look or a smile," says Jon Kasdan, director of In the Land of Women, in which Stewart portrayed a teenager with a crush on her twenty-something neighbor, played by Adam Brody. "She doesn't have to say, `Oh, I'm so filled with longing'—she can just do it."

Enter Bella Swan. Bella is the epitome of longing. She is yearning when every other quality has been stripped away. Stewart's ability to convey this to the near-total exclusion of all other emotions is surely responsible, at least in part, for the immense popularity of the Twilight franchise. The (mostly) female fan base may be pining for Edward Cullen in the wispy form of Robert Pattinson or Jacob Black in the decidedly more buff embodiment of Taylor Lautner, but Bella is the vessel for the audience's collective desire. Stewart calls Bella "the most sort of undeveloped character I've played" and notes, "I had to bring myself to [the part]." But whatever real-life aspects she transferred to Bella, the unsung brilliance of her performance is that she also left her sufficiently skeletal so that viewers can do the same. "I think that's partly why the movies are the phenomenon that they are, and it feels like she's not getting a tremendous amount of credit for that," Kasdan says. "Yes, women love the guy and so forth, but they're loving him through her."

A few months later, Stewart and I meet again, this time in the corner booth of a dimly lit hotel restaurant in Hollywood. Again she is dressed all in black—her hooded sweatshirt reads nuns with guns: praise the lord and pass the ammunition—but her hair is lighter and longer, and she seems calmer, not as tightly coiled.

The Twilight pressure is off, for the moment anyway—at least until Eclipse arrives in theaters and inevitably arouses the scary lunacy its predecessors did. This time around, Bella learns "that there are, like, different levels of loving someone," Stewart says vaguely. Or, as David Slade puts it: "Bella is at the verge of the abyss in this film, and she knows she has to step off...." Two hours of good, cathartic longing.

But Stewart is looking not so far beyond this month to the fall release of "the coolest movie ever," Welcome to the Rileys, directed by Jake Scott. She plays a 16-year-old stripper-prostitute, "an open wound" of a girl, as she says, befriended by a middle-aged couple (Melissa Leo and James Gandolfini) grieving the death of their daughter. The premise sounds like indie sap, but it works, and the sparely written script showcases the actors' talents. Stewart renders her wild, damaged character with a complexity and control not evident in her previous performances. To prepare, she lived on junk food, learned to pole dance, chain-smoked, and stayed up all night. The rough living took its toll: Her legs bloom with bruises and her sallow skin with blemishes, all of them real. It's difficult to imagine another young actress subordinating her looks so completely to her performance. This may well be the role that loosens the association between Kristen Stewart and Bella Swan, poster child for teenage angst.

For the moment, though, there are plenty who see her as Bella. Preteen girls begin to cluster in the booth across from ours, birds of prey gathering to examine their find. The ecosystem of the restaurant has altered. Stewart knows she's been sighted. I nab the moment to ask her the question on everyone's mind: "In real life, would you be Team Edward or Team Jacob?"

"Oh my God, did you seriously just ask that?" She laughs. "Shhhh." Those buzzwords make her nervous; she's been mobbed before. "I would never cheapen my relationships by talking about them. People say, `Just say who you're dating. Then people will stop being so ravenous about it.' It's like, No they won't! They'll ask for specifics." (A possible clue exists on the Kindle she has brought with her: Among the downloads is Guy de Maupassant's Bel-Ami, the movie version of which Pattinson is filming.)

"I want a cigarette," Stewart announces. It's almost a dare. The little girls swarm. She poses for a picture with them. Cigarettes in hand, she slips out the door.